a hiding place

It’s time for a new picture, this time featuring my lovely sister, Aggeliki! This one was shot minutes before “pathfinder“, in the exact same spot in the forest near my house, in my village. My hands were itching because I desperataly wanted to shoot in that forest, so as soon as were done with all the Easter celebrations (which bore me tremendously I must admit), I grabbed her and headed to the forest. Luckily we didn’t have to go very far, because our house is literally surrounded with it.

I had no idea what I was going to shoot, except that I knew I wanted to use a big old key that once belonged to my grandfather and has been hanging on our house wall ever since I can remember. And because my model was being shy, she didn’t want to show her face. So I just looked around for inspiration as we wandered, when I noticed a couple of huge rocks covered in moss and I knew they had to be in my picture. I set up my tripod the best I could on the slippery ground, gave my sister the key and tried to come up with a story. I thought of the two rocks as an entrance to another place and I asked my sister to pose as someone who is trying to unlock it. She was dressed in jeans and she had her jacket on because it was rather cold, so all I could do was wrap her with my favorite red sheet, like she was wearing a cape of some sort. It is the same one I used for “the inner tempest“. We tried many poses, none of which I liked. Here’s one of them, where she is holding the key trying to figure out how to use it. Or something like that.

You can see that the pose is somehow akward and you can’t really see the key or understand what is happening. Oh and the sheet is all wrinkled and messy, but hey, nobody’s perfect! I was starting to feel frustated because we were short on time, but then she stood up and said “well what if the key is lying on the rock and I am trying to reach it?”. What a marvellous idea that was! I immediately repositioned my tripod (not an easy thing to do under those circumstances) and finally I was happy with the result! The biggest challenge with this picture was getting rid of all those wrinkles on the sheet and making the key stand out more. I played around trying different methods and I am quite happy with what came up. I used frame expansion to include more scenery and I also made her hair and cape bigger. I thought that made her look more like a fairy tale character. Aggeliki loved it so much, she told me she wants to do more. Maybe we can even get those magnificent sons of hers to pose too, who knows?

a hiding place

The funny story behind this shoot was that at some point I asked Aggeliki to take off her rings and put them in my bag, but when we were done and about to go, she couldn’t find one of them! It is a quite expensive ring, so you can imagine the frustration. We ended up searching the whole area, turning every leaf and luckily I was able to find it after a while, quite far from were the bag was. I have no idea how it got there, but I was very relieved to find it. The ring was important to her, because it is the only piece of jewelry that was salvaged when robbers broke into her house and stole the rest. I wouldn’t bear being responsible for its loss! Not to mention that she would never agree to model for me again!

Here’s a detail of the image, so you can get a better look at the key.

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